Josh Nichols

Rip recorded video from a Motorola DVR cable box using a Powerbook

Ever since my HTPC bit the dust, I’ve been using the basic high definition DVR box that the cable company provides. It isn’t as good as Beyond TV, but it works well enough and doesn’t require an internet connection or extra equipment. The one thing I missed about my old HTPC was the ability to burn video I had recorded to DVD.

With a little internet searching, I found out that you can use your mac to rip video (even high definition) from cable boxes that have firewire ports on the back. The problem was, I couldn’t find any instructions on how to edit the captured video and burn it to DVD. Since the Mac already comes with great video and DVD authoring software in the iLife suite, I figured it couldn’t be a big deal to put it all together.

It was tricky and took hours to figure out, but it is possible and can be done with iLife and open source software. So, on to the instructions!

Equipment and software needed:

• A cable box with a firewire port on the back
• A G4 or faster Mac with a firewire port
• A male to male firewire cable
• Lots of hard drive space (especially if ripping HD video)
• iRecord (Ammesset)
• MPEG Streamclip
• iTunes
• iMovie HD
• iDVD
• Audacity (if you want to edit audio from your rips)

Rip the video

1. First, record a show on the cable box.
2. Connect your cable box to your computer with the firewire cable.
3. Launch iRecord (Ammesset).
4. Open the iRecord preferences and select ‘Devices.’ Confirm that your device is detected. Close the preferences window. (You may need to restart the cable box for it to be detected. If your device doesn’t show up, you may be out of luck.)
5. Select ‘New Event’ under the ‘File’ menu item to add a new event.
6. Name the show you are recording.
7. Change the duration to the length of the show.
8. Select a location for the video file to go on your computer.
9. Set the start time to a couple of minutes in the future.
10. Use the cable box and get the show you want to record ready to play. When iRecord starts recording, play the show.
11. When the show is over, check to see if iRecord finished. You can manually stop the recording.

What happened was, the cable box streamed the playing video over the firewire cable and iRecord captured it and wrote a special MPEG file (.m2t) to your computer. Next, you’ll need to convert this file to a DV or a more standard MPEG file so you can edit the video in iMovie. If you want, you can preview what you recorded to make sure everything worked correctly by opening the file with VLC Player.

You can also experiment some with iRecord. Certain cable boxes will allow the software to change channels, so you can program your Mac to act like a DVR. Mine didn’t, so I had to record what was currently playing.

Convert what you recorded

iMovie will not open the file that iRecord created. You have to convert it to a format that it can use. You will be using MPEG Streamclip to convert the video.

1. Open the file iRecod created in MPEG Streamclip.
2. At this point, you can do some simple editing by setting ‘In’ and ‘Out’ spots to cut out the video you don’t want at the beginning and the end of the file.
• To set the ‘Out’ point, drag the play head to the point on the time line where you want the video to end and click ‘Select Out’ in the ‘Edit’ menu. (I had to set the ‘out’ first. For some reason the ‘In’ wouldn’t stick until the ‘out’ was set.)
• Move the play head to your start position and mark it the ‘In’ point by clicking ‘Select In’ in the ‘Edit’ menu.
• You should have a dark gray bar in the time line showing the section of video you are exporting.
3. Export the video by going to the ‘File’ menu and picking which format you want to export as. For iMovie, you want ‘Export to DV …’. Choose a place for the file to go and wait for it to convert.

Now you have the video in a format that iMove likes. Time to edit.

If you want to keep the video as an MPEG file, you still can, but it requires purchasing the MPEG-2 Playback Component for Quicktime. It’s $20 and you don’t really need it. If you choose to go the MPEG route, iMovie doesn’t like the audio in the file and won’t play it. You will have to export the audio as a WAV file from the .m2t and import it in iTunes. Then you can pull it into iMovie as the soundtrack for your project.

Edit your video

Now’s the fun part. Open the DV file in iMove HD and edit. Insert chapters, cut commercials, whatever you want to do. I’m not going to go over how iMove works. You should be able to figure that out.

Author your DVD

Once you have your video edited, start an iDVD project and start building your DVD. Create menus and pull in as many videos as will fit. Again, iDVD is user friendly and you should be able to figure out how to use it.

All done!

And that’s it. Pretty easy, but really time consuming. That’s the main drawback to this method. You have to rip to your mac in real time and the process of converting, importing into iMovie and generating the DVD is slow.

As an extra bonus, if you want to rip the audio track out of a video you recorded with iRecord, you can export the audio to Aiff using MPEG Streamclip. Then use Audacity to edit the audio and split into tracks that can be imported into iTunes and burned to CD.

Update: What do you know, as soon as I write this up, I find some instructions on how to do it.